LITMIR.BIZ

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out of a pantleg. Although she had latched onto it as a tempting possibility, less and less did the drug angle look viable. Brooks’ gang was rounded up, squealing like shoats (or was it stoats?) for legal aid, but nothing about Jim had been forthcoming. Steve would have told her. Maybe she should speak to Brooks directly; surely he was out on bail by now. And the gold? Perhaps not the romantic dream of an old man at all. Jim’s drop haunted her, the last tangible reminder of her friend. As Omer had said, the area was full of treasure hunters searching new places yet undreamed and old places long played out. The generous meteorite which had blasted the Sudbury basin had planted many precious metals, gold and palladium among them.

      One of Belle’s favourite summer haunts, Bonanza Lake north of Wapiti, had been mined briefly around the turn of the century. Since it was accessible by old logging roads, Belle and Freya beat through undergrowth to climb the steep trail to its hills once or twice each summer. Not only were the blueberries spectacular, but the pellucid green lake attracted wise loons, who knew well ahead of the scientists that the PH of the troubled waters had been slowly improving. True, the only mine shaft she had actually seen had been filled in with rubble and ringed by rusted scraps of a fence, but she had traced along the walls of the water-filled excavations the petering-out of the quartzite. Aside from picking up a few specimens and taking a swim in the lake, Belle never ventured further into the dense bush, rife with bloody-minded flies and festooned with poison ivy.

      Tom Beardley would know. A retired chemist, he played prospector on the weekends, ferreting out tiny mining claims more for fun, boasting that he was an explorer, not a gold baron. A lucky find near Timmins had netted him twenty thousand dollars once, which he had blown quickly on a new Bronco, but that had been his only major discovery. Now and then Tom taught a night course in metallurgy at Nickel City College; Belle had met him there in the cafeteria on a break from a real estate seminar.

      Tom’s wife Dorothy answered Belle’s call. “Tom? Sure, he’s back from Wawa today. Never misses the Jays on television. No sooner unpacked than he’s rushed down to the Diamond Pipe to meet some of his gangster friends. Tell him for me he’d better not be home later than fifteen minutes after the game. And I’m listening.” The radio warbled in the background. Belle knew that Dorothy’s jocular threats held little sting. Tom had nursed her through several breast cancer operations and made sure that they escaped every February to the Portuguese Algarve, a favourite Canadian destination because of its bargain villas.

      The Diamond Pipe on Bathurst Street was jumping as Belle strolled in shortly after seven, so as not to interrupt the game. Her friend sat with Paolo Santanen, demolishing a platter of Buffalo wings. Tom, a huge man with a matching gut but strong as a Terex truck, looked as if he had not only pounded in the last spike of the Trans-Canada railway single-handedly, but all the others as well. He clapped his massive paws on the table and set his unshaven jaw in Paolo’s milk-mild Finnish face. “They’ll never make the grade without another couple of pitchers, my son. And sure as hell they trade any of their duds, those bozos’ll win the Cy Young award for their new team. Maybe it’s the coaches’ fault, who knows?”

      Nearing eighty, the small and wiry Paolo was developing a bow to his back, and he moved with slow deliberation. Derek had come along when he had been well into his fifties. Last time he and Belle had met, he had wiped tears from his eyes as he thanked her for helping his son get the Snopac job. “I want to die the day before I go into a nursing home, and the day before Derek ever gets in trouble again,” he had confessed privately as his wife Gerda boiled up some potatoes. Yet tonight Paolo seemed full of fire. “Jays got power to spare. Let ’em get five runs in the opposition, these boys’ll bring ’em up. You ain’t got no trust at all. Don’t you know baseball’s a game of faith?” Belle moved forward to catch Tom’s eye.

      “Belle? I haven’t seen you in months. Too busy grubbin’ real estate to talk with old pals?” With a friendly wink, he nabbed an extra chair from the next table and patted it. “Now how’s my Freya?” He and his short-haired pointer Duke loved to go birding. Three fat partridges that he had dropped off last fall, ivory breasts more succulent than chicken, had made a memorable stew.

      Paolo took her hand and squeezed it wordlessly as he met her eyes. She signalled the waitress for a beer by hoisting Tom’s bottle. “Good, for all of her ten years, but getting on like her mom.” She nibbled at a wing he offered. “Yow, hot stuff. Listen, I need some information from you, some mining expertise.”

      He roared into high gear, flexing his masculinity and nudging his friend. “The Midnight Prospector strikes again. And you said I was over the hill.”

      “Stop showing off, you old coot. I need to know about gold north of Wapiti, the Bonanza area maybe. Is anything still there?”

      “Up where the new park’s goin’ in? Nah, she’s all played out. Bonanza. Some joke, that name. Never did find nothing much, though they thought at first they had another boom like Cobalt. ’Course, that was long before my time. Closed up about a hunnert years ago. Nothing left now but a couple of filled-in shafts and rubble.”

      “That’s it? You mean the quartzite piles at the top of the hill? I’ve taken some pieces for my rock garden. White and brown.”

      “It’s pretty stuff. The brown’s siderite, a crystalline carbonate. That one heap’s all most people ever see. Couple other shafts a few hundred feet farther into the bush. Pretty dense and overgrown. Could be flooded, too. Dad said they were almost ninety feet down. Tanned me once as a kid when he thought I’d been fooling around there. Say, listen to me rattling on. What do you want to know about that played-out claim for? You don’t want to poke around those rotting timbers. The gasses are toxic. Methane, for one.” He gave her a serious look which spelled worry.

      “Could there be any gold left?”

      “Well, the companies gave up and never went back. That tells you something. Odds are against it. They mined out any veins as far as they could.”

      Belle narrowed her eyes and tapped his wrist gently. “But if someone found a streak, even a smallish one. Don’t ask me how; I never took geology. Why would they keep it quiet? Why not cash in?”

      “Are you kidding? Someone still owns rights to that land. And it would be ‘thank you very much, buddy. Now get lost.’ Except it probably wouldn’t be worth the company’s money to pursue a peanut find even with high tech. Cost them five million to get in, they’d need to make fifteen. This isn’t the Klondike of 1898, girl.”

      “So how could anything be retrieved profitably?”

      “Well, hell, you could blowtorch it out,” he boomed and gulped his beer with an approving belch. “A rich little vein, pocket gold mine. Drip her into what we call ‘buttons’. Ounce or two. Easy to carry. ’Course, you’d have to sell on the black market at less than half the price. Be worth it, though, damn government taxes. Lots of fun, too.”

      Paolo had been listening with interest, nodding at the excitement as he tried to get their attention. “You know, that could be. A chum of mine, after he retired, used to spend weekends loading tailings from an old site in Kirkland Lake into his pickup, take it back to his garage to crush. Called it the Lost Deutchman Mine. And you know, he made hisself enough to live on a good ten year. And good for him, I say. Pensions weren’t worth nothing back then.”

      Belle placed Jim’s drop in front of Tom’s bottle. His eyes widened, reflecting the yellow flame of the table’s light as he touched it lovingly, rubbed at the sheen. “That’s the ticket. The real thing, as they used to say before that there cola.”

      “Could this come from that method you describe? Dripped off? It sounds so primitive.”

      “Nothin’ more simple and more valuable than gold. Whoever made this has a pretty little girl for sure. Lucky devil.”

      Belle pocketed the drop as a baby Jay belted a lead-off double to galvanize the crowd. What had Omer said about the drop having blood on it?

      NINETEEN

      The sunrise had a definite MGM lock on the pastel lavender of Liz Taylor’s eyes as

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